Gotham City Soul

The shortest month of the year should be the easiest, but it never is. Black History Month, coupled with the fact that my dad died in this month, make it busy and sorrowful for me. Busy and sorrowful are waters that are strange to navigate, and I for damn sure don't feel like preaching any black history today. So here is something that makes me smile every time I hear it, and I hope it will make you smile, too. Roy Ayers' "Sunshine". It's the herald of Spring, the promise of Summer. And while we're at it, to keep it Gotham, lets add Tom Browne, jazz trumpeter from Queens, with his classic "Funkin' for Jamaica (New York)".

Okay folks, I want to know: Which candidate, if any, do you think you will vote for in the primaries: Barack Obama; John McCain, Hillary Clinton; Mitt Romney; John Edwards; Mike Huckabee; Rudolph Giuliani (if he's still in the race come Super Tuesday)? I'm curious. I also want to know your race and gender and religion (if you are religious/spiritual) and approximate age. I'm reading so much about how this presidential race is about age, religion, gender, and color (as if no others were; this one is just more obvious). I want to see if there is anyone out there who breaks the demographic mold set up by (omnipresent, ever-shifting) polls. I won't try to convince you to vote for anyone, or ask you to say why you're voting for whom your voting, although I will be transparent and say if I could vote in the New York State primary (I can't because I'm not affiliated with a party: I would have had to become affiliated before the last general election) I'd be vot...

Today I'd like to give you a shortlist of books, films, and one event that I think are worth investigating. I haven’t read all of the books, or seen all of the movies: What they hav e in common is that they’ ve caught my attention. I’m hoping I’ll be able to write about all of them in more detail. But for now, without further ado: On Sunday, January 20 from 3 to 5 pm WNYC Radio and Civic Frame are cohosting a public conversation at the Brooklyn Museum called “Embracing the Radical King: Prophetic or Passé ?” In the press release it is described as “a critical examination and reclamation of a more complex Dr. King, featuring poetry, a montage of archival King photos and audio, and public conversation about some of his underemphasized , but no less defining, positions. Using Dr. King’s own words as a guide, WNYC Host Brian Lehrer and CivicFrame President April Yvonne Garrett will lead an interactive panel discussion in which esteemed public intellectuals and the audience will h...

My home state of New Jersey apologized for slavery yesterday. I wasn’t going to blog about it until I read what a Republican assemblyman had to say about it according to the Associated Press: “But this was a sin that was atoned for in blood 150 years ago by the death of 650,000 Americans,” [Richard] Merkt R[epublican]-Morris [County] said, referring to the Civil War. “America does not and has never accepted the notion of collective guilt,” Merkt said. "We can all, and should all, express profound sorrow about the evils of slavery, but none of us can truly apologize for the institution because neither we nor anyone we represent was in any way responsible for it.” PLEASE! I’m so tired of that “our ancestors came here after slavery, we have nothing to do with that” mantra, I can’t tell you. TIRED. He couldn’t let his fellow legislators do a good thing, he just couldn’t. Here’s what I have to say to Assemblyman Merkt and all those other white folks who have the temerity to ask me “...

Today I received an invitation to an exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery called quite plainly “African American Art: 200 Years.” For those who are aficionados, the list of artists whose works will be shown may not come as huge surprise. But that’s what makes me so happy about this show: Many of the artists have become so well-known, so documented, so a part of art history that t hey are old hat! This is good news to me (although not to some, but I plan to write about the dissent among artists of color in a future blog) For those who want to gain a basic grounding in African-American art, this is a great place to start; there are works by nineteenth-century artists such as Robert Scott Duncanson, as well as living artists such as Elizabeth Catlett. Two hundred years of it. I want to get a good look at a few of these pieces close up and pretend, for a moment, that I could actually own one of them (I'm particularly enamored of the image at the bottom right of this entry, an...

I was not going to post this blog entry because I feared it might come off as me being a killjoy during the holiday season. I mean, oh boy, a blog about death on New Year's—way to go Audrey. But I wrote this in good faith, spirit, and humor and it is something I wanted to share with you at the end of this year and the beginning of the next. Because I love you, not because I want to bum you out. Plus you have to admit, that picture above is pretty fun ny . I do have a plan to get back to history and soul and New York City and all that good jazz in 2008. But for now . . . Joe Black: Don't be feisty, sista . Jamaican Woman: I not be feisty mista . You com' for me that's good news. Joe Black: Can do no right by people. I com' to take you, you want to stay - I leave you stay, you want to go. from Meet Joe Black By now people who read my blog might think I’m a bit preoccupied with death . I’m not, really. But the “death” of 2007 makes me think of it. And in my own way, ...

So I arrived in Newark Airport from Savannah yesterday around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I prefer Newark to LaGuardia and JFK for a couple of reasons, not the least of them being state loyalty. Yes, I will travel out of New York City to Jersey paying the $15 surcharge to the Taxi and Limousine Commission to fly out of Newark. Newark Airport makes sense to me. It’s laid out in a way that I can navigate. I just like it better. I traveled to Newark via cab last Friday because I just couldn’t get up early enough to do anything else, and bless the Supershuttle for being so cheap ($21, one-way; 12 for additional people in your party) and proletarian, but it has its issues (namely, you’re packed in like a sardine; they pick you up way too early for your flight—3 am for a 7 am takeoff, for example; there’s always somebody who is stunningly late for his or her flight (because he or she lied to the dispatcher about the time of the flight) and is killing the driver in a death by a thousand irri...